Android!

[Oban]

From what I have read, it looks like Honeycomb is exclusively for tablets:

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/01/sneak-peak-of-android-30-honeycomb.html

Now with video

[MuffinMan]

Well, it's not like they're stopping development on Android for smartphones so I assume there will just be different Honeycombs for phones and tablets. That is unless they do something weird like only name tablet versions and just leave phones with the version number or even have two separate names for them.

[MahrinSkel]

I suspect this is aimed more at my dream machine: a smartphone that can replace not just a laptop, but the desktop.  If your smartphone has enough power to do any computation you need, enough storage to hold any data you want immediate access to (as opposed to cloud storage), and can be plugged into a full-size monitor and used with a mouse and keyboard, why have a laptop or desktop at all?

Sure, your answer and mine would be "playing games", but what was the last game you could only play on the PC?  How much can you really justify the cost of a gaming PC, anymore?  For most people, "gaming" means consoles or web games.

--Dave

[Furiously]

I'm sure at some point that will be reality for most people.

I'm almost frightened how integrated the android is. It pulls contacts from gmail and facebook.

[Quinton]

I suspect this is aimed more at my dream machine: a smartphone that can replace not just a laptop, but the desktop.  If your smartphone has enough power to do any computation you need, enough storage to hold any data you want immediate access to (as opposed to cloud storage), and can be plugged into a full-size monitor and used with a mouse and keyboard, why have a laptop or desktop at all?

Sure, your answer and mine would be "playing games", but what was the last game you could only play on the PC?  How much can you really justify the cost of a gaming PC, anymore?  For most people, "gaming" means consoles or web games.

Check out Moto's Atrix device: http://goo.gl/1ipai

They're not doing it quite how I would (the large screen mode is a slightly different world, which really in honeycomb would not be necessary...) but they're playing with the sort of things you're talking about here.  Basically they have a desktop dock which has hdmi + 3xUSB and a "laptop dock" which is a laptop like keyboard/display/battery thing that you plug the phone into.

[Vaiti]

That is very sexy.

[Oban]

have two three separate names

Android.
Honeycomb.
ChromeOS.

[SnakeCharmer]

Check out Moto's Atrix device: http://goo.gl/1ipai

That's so freaking cool.

[ashrik]

I just bought an HTC G2, which is a pretty big upgrade from my old Nokia 5310 Xpressmusic.

I'm still trying to get the hang of things. Has anyone had luck in getting their contacts from their old phone to display easily in Android. My contacts list doesn't want to show them unless they're associated with either my gmail, facebook, or twitter account- which pretty much means that they need to have an e-mail address with them. My oldest contacts like HOME or MOM are just a name and a number and I can't pull them up without doing a specific search for them, which is annoying. Is there any way to get them on my regular Contacts list?

[KallDrexx]

I have contacts in my phone without email, entered both through the phone and gmail's interface.

I don't have an HTC phone though so I don't know about their custom apps, but it's definitely possible.

[ffc]

I just bought an HTC G2, which is a pretty big upgrade from my old Nokia 5310 Xpressmusic.

I'm still trying to get the hang of things. Has anyone had luck in getting their contacts from their old phone to display easily in Android. My contacts list doesn't want to show them unless they're associated with either my gmail, facebook, or twitter account- which pretty much means that they need to have an e-mail address with them. My oldest contacts like HOME or MOM are just a name and a number and I can't pull them up without doing a specific search for them, which is annoying. Is there any way to get them on my regular Contacts list?

The solution is buried in a menu somewhere, through the contacts screen I think (contacts-menu-display?). A relative had the same problem and I had the joy of fixing it. His phone was only syncing and displaying contacts from exchange which was silly since most had no phone number whereas phone number only contacts through tmobile and on the phone were not displaying. A few checkboxes later and all was well.

Wish I could be of more help than saying try clicking on more stuff.

[RhyssaFireheart]

So, rather than trying to reread this entire thread to figure this out - if someone was thinking of switching to an Android phone, which would folks suggest?  Carrier would be Verizon, because we've been with them for years now and are totally happy with our service.

We can't switch for a few months yet (early upgrades are in May) but I figure it's worth starting to look now.  He may want to stay on BB, who knows if Verizon's iPhone will be out by then and honestly, I stopped into a store tonight to play with the Droid phones and rather liked what I saw.

[Trippy]

We'll know next week when the iPhone on Verizon will be available.

[ashrik]

I just bought an HTC G2, which is a pretty big upgrade from my old Nokia 5310 Xpressmusic.

I'm still trying to get the hang of things. Has anyone had luck in getting their contacts from their old phone to display easily in Android. My contacts list doesn't want to show them unless they're associated with either my gmail, facebook, or twitter account- which pretty much means that they need to have an e-mail address with them. My oldest contacts like HOME or MOM are just a name and a number and I can't pull them up without doing a specific search for them, which is annoying. Is there any way to get them on my regular Contacts list?

The solution is buried in a menu somewhere, through the contacts screen I think (contacts-menu-display?). A relative had the same problem and I had the joy of fixing it. His phone was only syncing and displaying contacts from exchange which was silly since most had no phone number whereas phone number only contacts through tmobile and on the phone were not displaying. A few checkboxes later and all was well.

Wish I could be of more help than saying try clicking on more stuff.

A friend figured it out for me last night. Apparently all of the group-less contacts (not connected to my gmail, facebook, etc) became automagically grouped under gmail. By enabling them all to display, I was able to add all my old numbers to my contact list again.

[AutomaticZen]

So will honeycomb be exclusively for tablets or will it also retain backwards compatibility with smartphones? 

Well, Engadget had an interview with Matias Duarte and his answer (around 11 minutes in) was pretty much, "Honeycomb is Android." The preview was for tablets, but Honeycomb is apparently what they are using across the entire Android platform.

[Krakrok]

It needs to be easier to publish Google App Inventor apps to the Android marketplace :(

[Furiously]

Having an Ipod Touch and and Android phone, I will say the apple UI is like ... consistent.

Going back pages, in the android is like....what button do I press in this app.

[MahrinSkel]

Having an Ipod Touch and and Android phone, I will say the apple UI is like ... consistent.

Going back pages, in the android is like....what button do I press in this app.

It's a shortfall now, but it does make for a "creative ferment", as app developers converge on the better solutions it will get better, and in the meantime there's a lot of innovation.

--Dave

[Quinton]

Having an Ipod Touch and and Android phone, I will say the apple UI is like ... consistent.

Going back pages, in the android is like....what button do I press in this app.

This always has me scratching my head because I find Apple's UI to be terribly inconsistent in many ways.  How do I go back in an iThing app?  I tap the back button -- it'll be in the upper left or maybe the upper right or sometimes the lower left or look the lower right, no maybe I swipe right-to-left, no that's not it, I guess I press the Home button and start again from the top in this app!  At least for going back, Android has a back button.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of room for improvement in Android UI, but I find that we are routinely compared to some Platonic ideal of iPhone UI where everything is consistent and works and never takes many seconds to launch and never, ever, stutters when drawing, ever! 

I'm also amused that if there are any problems with voice or data, it's *always* AT&T's fault and never Apple's, except for "antennagate" which wasn't really a bug because you know they gave away free rubber bumpers to shield their bad antenna design from your holding-it-the-wrong-way hands.

You may have to excuse my sarcasm, since I am in mourning, due to the fact that I will be out of a job next month once iPhone4 sells on Verizon, the only network in the whole world where people ever bought Android phones (Not sure who's buying 170+ different handsets on carriers world-wide, but I'm sure Steve will explain it's all a lie).

[Oban]

Actually, the overwhelming majority of the voice/data complaints related to the iPhone are AT&T's fault.

The umts baseband that Apple uses does have an issue with the speed with which it searches for and connects to roaming networks, but even that is sometimes related to sim card programming done by the carrier.

[Tebonas]

You are wrong in your Sarcasm, though. I just checked all apps made by Apple on my iphone to be sure. The Back Button is on the top left in each of them.

And according to their UI guidelines, so should all other Apps. But I guess some slip through in their App Store review process (thats what I'M bitter about, so don't mind me).

There are many annoying things with Iphones. The UI isn't one of them.

[Quinton]

Actually, the overwhelming majority of the voice/data complaints related to the iPhone are AT&T's fault.

What do you base that statement on?  Having worked with a number of baseband chipsets over the past decade and a half, and having seen all kinds of horrible bugs both in the baseband and network-side, I'm pretty reluctant to assign all, or even majority blame to a network.  Also, having developed and deployed UMTS handsets on AT&T, TMO, various European carriers, etc, I have not seen much evidence of AT&T being significantly better or worse than other networks on the average.  I certainly have not experienced the kind of call droppage on AT&T that iPhone users complain of.

Of course, network related issues are often highly location dependent.  I've found AT&T to be worse up in SF than down on the peninsula, etc.

[Quinton]

I may be behind the times as I haven't really played with a iPhone4 or with a newer build of the OS on older devices.  I've certainly seen plenty of inconsistency in Apple apps on previous versions -- my comments were based on my personal experience using an iPhone's stock apps.

[Tebonas]

User Interface Guidelines

Navigation Bar

A navigation bar enables navigation through an information hierarchy and, optionally, management of screen contents.

Appearance and Behavior

A navigation bar appears at the upper edge of an application screen, just below the status bar. A navigation bar usually displays the title of the current screen or view, centered along its length. When navigating through a hierarchy of information, users tap the back button to the left of the title to return to the previous screen. Otherwise, users can tap content-specific controls in the navigation bar to manage the contents of the screen.

All controls in a navigation bar include a bezel around them, which, in iOS, is the bordered style. If you place a plain (borderless) control in a navigation bar, it automatically converts to the bordered style.

On iPhone, changing the device orientation from portrait to landscape can change the height of the navigation bar automatically. On iPad, the height and translucency of a navigation bar does not change with rotation.

On iPhone, a navigation bar always displays across the full width of the screen. On iPad, a navigation bar can display within a view, such as one pane of a split view, that does not extend across the screen.

Thats how it works in theory. I've not checked every case in every App in the 5 minutes research before I wrote my last message, but from my normal usage I am always enraged when it behaves otherwise in 3rd party apps, so I never stumbled upon in mail, contacts, calendar, Photos or Notes (the Apple apps I regularly use), or I would remember the rage.

To be fair, Android really improved leaps and bounds in their own UI, and would I have tested my Android now instead of with the G1, I suspect I would have never bought an iPhone.

[Quinton]

Both platforms have strengths and weaknesses, to be sure.  I'm certainly willing to give Apple credit for being insane about the last 10% polish that makes products really shine.  We're definitely improving things (we've come a loooong way from G1), but they do set a high bar, and their laser focus on a single product or product family doesn't hurt.

The nice thing, as I've mentioned before, is the mobile space is enormous and it is not likely to be a place where a single player (no matter how much they may want to) will achieve the kind of dominance that Microsoft did in the PC market in the 80s/90s.  Partially, too, because OEMs and endusers have seen the danger of that kind of control, and are more cautious these days.

[Tebonas]

The G1 was an engineers toy, and it showed. It felt like a Linux distribution where nobody configured the Desktop manager because real people use the command line anyway. The Samsung galaxy my stepdaughter uses on the other hand shows that there were people involved who cared about presentation as well.

And yes, competition is good. Android improved because of it, and so did the iPhone.

[Oban]

The nice thing, as I've mentioned before, is the mobile space is enormous and it is not likely to be a place where a single player (no matter how much they may want to) will achieve the kind of dominance that Microsoft did in the PC market in the 80s/90s.  Partially, too, because OEMs and endusers have seen the danger of that kind of control, and are more cautious these days.

I agree with this statement, the current mobile market is flourishing with a healthy selection of devices for pretty much all of the available target markets.  It is nice to see users having an actual choice in what platform to purchase.

Someone just needs to come up with a UI for toddlers.

[NiX]

Someone just needs to come up with a UI for toddlers.

It has Mommy and Daddy buttons.

[Oban]

Wow, I did not realize Microsoft's new UI was that bad.

[Engels]

anecdotal evidence here we go!

Girlfriend as co-pilot in car. She has an HTC Android phone, I have iPhone 3Gs. We're trying to find a route to a ferry terminal. I tell her to use her phone's map application to find it. She can't figure it out for beans and ends up using my iPhone's map app to get the directions. Now, I haven't tried to use the Android's map application (which I presume is a mobile google maps), but you know something's wrong when someone who owns an Android phone finds it easier to use the maps application on an iPhone.

[Quinton]

How to use the map application.

1. hold the search button (magnifying glass) for a second or two, or tap it and then tap the microphone icon
2. say "navigate to <address>"

There are places in Android where the platform could use some love, but Google Maps Mobile and Navigation (turn by turn directions) on Android are massively better than maps on iphone or just about any other mobile device.

[Vaiti]

I have to agree. Even here in Finland speaking directions into my phone in finnish will get me the right results. So I'm kind of inclined to say that is user error.

Also, open maps application, press menu, hit directions. Put in direction. Done. And pressing menu is a given for pretty much any Android app. So that little step shouldn't have been a mystery at all, unless she just doesn't actually use her phone at all. In which case failure to learn how to use a product you bought isn't really the fault of the product.

[MahrinSkel]

Did you turn on the GPS first?  You have to turn on GPS reception and wait 10 seconds or so for it to firm up its position before Google Maps navigation really works properly, on my Droid 2.  And it's so-so for using while walking.  Dunno if iPhone works differently for navigation.  You can leave GPS on, but it will kill your battery life if it's not in a dock.

--Dave

[Ingmar]

Speaking of battery life I definitely recommend the extended battery for the Droid 2. It adds a little weight and maybe 2 mm of thickness, but I can go 3+ days without recharging the thing now. (Mind you I got good battery life out of it in general as I'm never in a bad signal area for the most part.)

Only downside is it takes 3 million years to fully charge it now.

[AutomaticZen]

anecdotal evidence here we go!

Girlfriend as co-pilot in car. She has an HTC Android phone, I have iPhone 3Gs. We're trying to find a route to a ferry terminal. I tell her to use her phone's map application to find it. She can't figure it out for beans and ends up using my iPhone's map app to get the directions. Now, I haven't tried to use the Android's map application (which I presume is a mobile google maps), but you know something's wrong when someone who owns an Android phone finds it easier to use the maps application on an iPhone.

Open Google Maps, type in address.  DONE!

Could she not figure out how to open Google Maps?